‘The Medieval Oliphant’ Traces the Horn Used by Warriors and Hunters

Elephant tusks were carved to make medieval instruments called oliphants, such as the one above from before 1098.Credit
National Museum of Denmark

FROM ELEPHANT TUSKS INTO MEDIEVAL HORNS

No one would mistake Columbia University’s art history department for a medieval town, but the trumpet sounds wafting through the offices recently harked back to a time when feudal lords used such music to announce feasts, hunts or enemy attacks. On this day it was the professor Avinoam Shalem who was playing the music, a sort of informal announcement of his new book, “The Medieval Oliphant,” written in German with Maria Glaser and released by Dietrich Reimer Publishing.

The recording, in the form of a CD that accompanies his book, features musicians playing medieval instruments called oliphants, made from elephant tusks. The ivory surfaces include carvings of birds, fruit, wolves and camels, as well as Latin inscriptions and portraits of warriors and hunters.

The tuneless blast “conquers space,” Mr. Shalem said; anyone hearing it would know “you’re under the territory of someone.” That someone was announcing that he controlled vast properties and was cosmopolitan enough to import elephant tusks.

Mr. Shalem’s book describes 100 carved tusks and fragments in institutional and private collections, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Middle East. The instruments are up to several feet long, and were meant to hang from chains around the necks of musicians. The shorter and skinnier the tusk, the higher the notes produced. Each owner would have had his own identifiable sound.

Warriors returning from battle were handed oliphants filled with wine and told that if they could drink without spilling a drop, their wives had been faithful. One legend has it that during a feast at King Arthur’s court, the king accidentally spilled wine while drinking from the tusk and had to be prevented from stabbing his queen.

The objects routinely bring six-figure prices at auction. In 2010, Sotheby’s in London sold an oliphant made in Italy around 1100 for about $690,000. In December, at Christie’s in Paris, an oliphant carved around 1500 in Sierra Leone brought about $200,000.

Mr. Shalem’s research team has traced oliphant provenances to royal and church treasuries; sometimes they had to weed out 19th-century copies.

He has been hunting for a 12th-century Italian oliphant that belonged to the 19th-century legal scholar Eduard Gans, who was a mentor to Karl Marx. “It just disappeared; we have it only in photos,” Mr. Shalem said.

REGIONAL TASTES IN CHAIRS

Furniture researchers are examining the varying tastes of chair buyers in the United States, not only from state to state but also from city to city.

“Of the Best Materials and Good Workmanship: 19th Century New Jersey Chairmaking,” an exhibition opening on April 23 at the Morven Museum & Garden in Princeton, N.J., explores slat backs, plump finials and folding-chair frames that were popular in Bergen County, patented plywood seats made in Hunterdon County and the Trenton tradition of painted fruit motifs.

Photo

A yellow-pine sectional settee from Orange County, Va., from between 1800-15 may foreshadow modern sectionals. Its maker is unknown.Credit
Hal Stuart

The show’s main curator, Joseph W. Hammond, pored over records maintained by descendants of chair suppliers and deciphered the markings of obscure makers. He also documented elite customers, like the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia and the Cunard cruise line.

“Every community, including small crossroads communities, had their local chair maker,” Mr. Hammond said in an interview, adding that few attempts had been made to survey New Jersey’s myriad chair fashions.

Farther south, Hal Stuart, a historian in eastern Virginia, is finishing a book, “Virginia Sectional Furniture: 1800-1860,” about sectional sofas typically equipped with wheels and corner end chairs. He has found about 15 in Virginia and Washington, including sets made for plantations and Supreme Court offices. A major supplier, Green & Brother Steam Furniture Works in Alexandria, Va., applied mahogany veneers to the practical design.

For the Greens to compete with furniture makers in New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore, Mr. Stuart said, they “had to innovate.”

Finding sectionals for sale (they can cost as little as $1,500 each) and in museums and private hands has been tricky, he said, because they have been labeled loungers, settees and love seats, among other terms. He has delved so deeply into the research that he has replicated the reddish finishes on sofas, by mixing brick dust with lemon juice, linseed oil, vinegar and buttermilk, and he is trying to persuade scholars that 19th-century Virginians invented the form, which 20th-century modernists later popularized.

“Sometimes there’s been years of boredom and perpetual ridicule from people,” he said of those who don’t believe the form predates the modernists. He added that he would like to inspire antiques fans and newcomers to the field to look at museum and historical society rooms with a fresh appreciation for forgotten inventions on display.

“Part of my goal here is to get people off their sofas,” he said.

Other tightly focused regional studies are also underway. The furniture dealer and historian Sanford Levy, who runs Jenkinstown Antiques in New Paltz, N.Y., has been searching for “the 18th-century ‘flat arm’ ladderback chairs of Ulster County” in New York. Robert Leath, the chief curator at Old Salem Museums & Gardens in Winston-Salem, N.C., has identified Quaker families who made chairs along the Virginia-North Carolina border. He discovered which ones came from which regions but had been improperly displayed in galleries with products from other states over the years.

Although he has not yet published his findings, Mr. Leath said, “We’ve already moved the chairs” so that the Virginians and North Carolinians are side by side.

A version of this article appears in print on April 10, 2015, on Page C26 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘The Medieval Oliphant’ Traces the Horn Used by Warriors and Hunters. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe